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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "alternatives"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Thu, 25 Jul 2013 08:31:27 PDTTwo New Reports Confirm: Best Way To Reduce Piracy Dramatically Is To Offer Good Legal AlternativesGlyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130723/12235723906/two-new-reports-confirm-best-way-to-reduce-piracy-dramatically-is-to-offer-good-legal-alternatives.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130723/12235723906/two-new-reports-confirm-best-way-to-reduce-piracy-dramatically-is-to-offer-good-legal-alternatives.shtml
At the beginning of last year we reported on a Swedish study that showed that streaming services had halved the number of people who were downloading music illegally in Scandinavia. That's a pretty stunning figure, but of course is only one data point, which means that people can always argue that it's not possible to generalize. So it's good that not just one but two new reports confirm and broaden that finding.

The report shows that in 2008 almost 1.2 billion songs were copied without permission. However, by 2012 that figure had plummeted to 210 million, just 17.5% of its level four years earlier.

As expected, piracy of movies and TV shows in 2008 was at much lower levels than music, with 125 million movies and 135 million TV shows copied without permission. But by last year the figures for both had reduced by around half, to 65 million and 55 million respectively.

What's interesting is that music has fallen far more than the others. One explanation for that could be the effect observed in the Swedish study referred to above, and the fact that there are far more legal offerings for music than for other media. That's borne out by other figures from the Norwegian research:

Of those questioned for the survey, 47% (representing around 1.7 million people) said they use a streaming music service such as Spotify. Even more impressively, just over half (corresponding to 920,000 people and 25% of Norwegian Internet users) said that they pay for the premium option.

Not only has the number of people engaging in music piracy in the Netherlands fallen in recent times, it also appears to be an infrequent activity for most of those who remain.

There were 6.8m residential broadband connections in the Netherlands in 2012

BitTorrent music piracy occurred on 1.8m unique IPs in 2012, around a quarter of the total

Of that 1.8m, a large passive group of 532,000 (29%) downloaded just one music file

A minority of 188,000 (10%) "hardcore" pirates downloaded 16 files or more

This Long Tail distribution is an important insight, as it highlights that most people take very little. Meanwhile, the top 10% take over half of the content.

The Spotify study quotes some figures from earlier work in the Netherlands, which show that the number of active pirates declined from around 5 million in 2008 to 3 million in 2011 and 1.8 million in 2012. Because the methodologies of the studies were different, these may not be strictly comparable, but they do give an idea of the general direction. The research also provides the following information:

Again, copyright maximalists will doubtless say these are only a few studies, but such claims are looking weaker with every new result that confirms the general trend across multiple countries. They all underline what Techdirt has been saying for years: that the best way to reduce piracy is simply to increase the number of legal options offering what people want at a fair price.

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]]>pretty-obvious,-reallyhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130723/12235723906Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:44:43 PDTThe Killing Of Google Reader Highlights The Risk Of Relying On A Single ProviderMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130313/17262322315/killing-google-reader-highlights-risk-relying-single-provider.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130313/17262322315/killing-google-reader-highlights-risk-relying-single-provider.shtmlis shutting down Google Reader took many, many people by surprise. My Twitter feed blew up with people freaking out about it. For those who use it, many really rely on it for their daily information gathering process. I know the feeling, because I used to do that -- though a few years ago I shifted to mostly using Twitter via a well-organized Tweetdeck, and found that to be just as (if not more) effective, though a somewhat different overall experience that took some getting used to.

Still, a very large number of folks I know feel like they practically live inside Google Reader -- and I know (for example) that Google Reader is a huge driver of traffic to this site, so I get the feeling many of you use Google Reader as well. The thing that seems to have so many folks upset is the fact that there really aren't any comparable alternatives if you want that same basic experience. In fact, you could argue that Google effectively killed off many of those alternatives. Back in the day there were things like Newsgator and Bloglines, but both were effectively marginalized or pushed into other markets because Google Reader really did become the de facto standard RSS reader that so many used and relied on.

Anyway, I have a few separate thoughts on all of this and might as well go through them bullet point style:

This highlights the problem of relying too much on a single provider when there are few alternatives. As such, I wonder if Google may not realize the wider impact of this move. For example, it has me directly rethinking how much I rely on Google Calendar, Google Drive and Gmail. Now, I don't think any of those are going away any time soon, but not too long ago (um, yesterday, according to some...) you could have said the same exact thing about Reader. I'm now planning to do a more serious personal audit of services I use and how reliant I am on a single provider, and start making sure I have working alternatives in place and ready to go. In the end, this will certainly make me a lot less tied to Google's services, which is probably a good thing, but probably not the sort of thing Google is hoping its users will be doing.

As mentioned, personally, I moved away from RSS readers to a purely Twitter/Tweetdeck approach to consuming news. It took a few months of doing both, but when I shut down the RSS reader, I never looked back. It's a different experience, but has some benefits. But, what that suggests is that if people are looking for a culprit for what brought us to this moment, Twitter is the prime suspect. Yes, Twitter and RSS are different in many significant ways. But, in terms of the basic user benefit that people get out of both ("my stream of news & info"), they clearly compete.

The lack of serious alternatives represents a serious opportunity for someone enterprising. Believe it or not, before Google Reader even launched we at Techdirt had built our own RSS reader, called the Techdirt InfoAdvisor, that functioned quite a lot like Google Reader, but which had some other really useful features for us internally and for some of our business clients (we would use it to curate accounts for clients, with added commentary from us). Eventually, we shut it down, because (as Google has discovered), it's actually a lot of work to maintain something like that for a variety of reasons, and soaks up tremendous resources. Still, my first reaction was to joke that maybe we should dust off our old code, put it up and see if anyone wanted to use it. We're not likely to do that (unless all of you start throwing money our way), but someone else likely is going to jump into this space quickly. They may not build a huge business out of it, but I'd bet if they weren't looking for VC-style hockey stick returns, that someone could build a decent business out of it.

It is always interesting to look at product lifecycles, but most of the time when online products die off, the writing was on the wall long before it happened. This one struck me as a surprise since so many people relied so heavily on it, and it seems really abrupt and likely to upset the basic workflow of so many -- especially in the journalism and academic fields. I can respect the reasons for killing off a "non-essential" product, but it feels like Google seriously underestimated the level to which people had built Google reader into their daily lives.

It wouldn't surprise me, given how loud the backlash is, if Google extends the deadline for shutting down Reader, or if it eventually tries to work out some sort of alternative resolution. We saw the same thing, to a lesser extent, back when AskJeeves tried to shut down Bloglines (the Google Reader of its day before Google Reader existed). And, eventually, Ask sold it off to another company who apparently has kept it running (though, who knows how many users it has today). I think that experience actually pushed a bunch of Bloglines users to jump to Google on the assumption that Google Reader was safe. You would think that someone within Google would remember how that whole thing played out. It's surprising that they don't appear to have learned anything from it.

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]]>leaves-open-an-opportunityhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130313/17262322315Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:00:50 PSTSkateboard Legend Stacy Peralta Demonstrates His Latest Trick: Cashing In By Going Direct-To-FanMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20130121/15164421744/skateboard-legend-stacy-peralta-demonstrates-his-latest-trick-cashing-going-direct-to-fan.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20130121/15164421744/skateboard-legend-stacy-peralta-demonstrates-his-latest-trick-cashing-going-direct-to-fan.shtmlself-distribute his latest film, Bones Brigade, about the famous skateboarding crew Peralta himself had put together a few decades ago (the crew included some of the most famous skateboarders ever: Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, Steve Caballero, Mike McGill and Tommy Guerrero). Peralta had shown the film at Sundance last year, which is where most filmmakers go to try to "sell" their film to a studio/distributor to go make something of it. However, Peralta turned down all such offers (some for significant money), and instead went the "direct to fan" self-distribution path, using tools like TopSpin, and partnering with companies like BitTorrent as well. That's what we wrote about in August.

Now, as the latest Sundance is underway, TopSpin's Bob Moczydlowsky has a post with some details of how it all went, noting that going direct to fan was massively successful for Peralta, allowing him to both make more money and still retain the rights to the film, rather than selling them off to some other entity.

And now, a year after the Sundance premiere and six months from the start of the direct-to-fan release powered by Topspin, Film Sales Company and our partners awe.sm and The Uprising Creative, Stacy has earned more from direct sales than he would have from the combined total of the domestic and foreign sales offers. And, because a Topspin direct release does not require licensing rights, Stacy and Andrew Herwitz from Film Sales Company were then able to do their own Transactional VOD and Third-party license deals. Stacy and his financing partners quickly recouped the budget of the film, and the copyright remains in their hands for the future.

That really is the key. “I self financed, got the investment back, am now in profit and I own the copyright and will continue to earn all other sales for the next ten years,” says Stacy. “And it is all because I was empowered for the very first time to really do it myself from start to finish. Topspin has done for distribution what the Handycam did for shooting or the Avid did for editing. Topspin put it all in my hands and suddenly everything I needed was within my reach: pure and simple filmmakers democracy.”

They also included a nice little pie chart (to scale), showing how much bigger the pie was with what Peralta ended up doing:

This is not to say, of course, that the same thing is true for everyone who tries to go direct to fan. It's right for some people, and not right for others. But the key thing here is that there are more options and many of those options not only leave the actual creators with more control, but also allow them to expand the pie.

One of the more frustrating aspects of discussing these business model issues with some people is their assumption that the "pie" is static (or, worse, shrinking). It's a classic mistake in economics for those who think that everything is a zero sum game. But one of the great things about new technologies and services is how they enable a much broader audience and increase the opportunities, opening up wider possibilities -- especially for creators who really know how to engage with their fans.

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]]>how-it-all-workshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130121/15164421744Thu, 2 Feb 2012 04:55:34 PSTKickstarter Becomes The Darling Of Sundance By Financing Lots Of Movies... Without Movie Studio ArroganceMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120201/00543817615/kickstarter-becomes-darling-sundance-financing-lots-movies-without-movie-studio-arrogance.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120201/00543817615/kickstarter-becomes-darling-sundance-financing-lots-movies-without-movie-studio-arrogance.shtmlmassive growth of Kickstarter, especially in the movie space, and apparently that's being noticed at famous movie festivals like Sundance. David Carr has an article at the NY Times, in which he compares Kickstarter to a movie studio but without the arrogance of a studio. And, of course, it is a very different proposition. Unlike in a studio relationship, the artist retains the ownership of the work. Unlike in a studio relationship, there's no one at Kickstarter who has to "greenlight" the picture to get it made. Instead, it's entirely tied to the ability of filmmakers to get people to pay up (in small bunches) to make it work. And it does seem to be working:

[Kickstarter] had helped finance 10 percent of the festival's slate, 17 movies in all, including four that were in competition.

And did it all without the obnoxiousness of a tradtional Hollywood studio/distributor. Of course, this really highlights a point that we've been making for over a decade. While some traditionalists with little vision have spent the last decade screaming about how there are no new business models for producing content, it's become increasingly clear that where there's a need, such services and business models will get created. And, even better, they seem to be ones set up in a way where the artist has more choice and more control.

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]]>alternatives-arisehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120201/00543817615Tue, 11 Oct 2011 01:48:27 PDTAs Expected, Alternative DNS Systems Sprouting Up To Ignore US CensorshipMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111010/03123916277/as-expected-alternative-dns-systems-sprouting-up-to-ignore-us-censorship.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111010/03123916277/as-expected-alternative-dns-systems-sprouting-up-to-ignore-us-censorship.shtmlbrowser extension, called MAFIAAfire, that would route around any ICE seizures and take you directly to the sites whose domains had been seized. This is, as the internet saying goes, a form of seeing censorship as "damage" and routing around it. Of course, that could be done on a much larger scale. As a bunch of the folks who built key pieces of the core internet infrastructure warned, continuing this kind of policy (and extending it with PROTECT IP) will lead to more workarounds that inevitably will fracture key pieces of the internet and make it significantly less secure. Supporters of PROTECT IP refuse to heed this warning -- and, from what we've heard -- refuse to compromise and make sure that the basic functioning of DNS will be protected.

So now, totally as expected, we're already seeing alternative DNS systems showing up, advertising that they should be used to route around US government censorship of such websites. The one getting attention these days is called BlockAid.me.

What's just as stunning as the fact that supporters of PROTECT IP still can't figure out how this is really, really bad, is that they also don't realize how this pretty much destroys any argument the US makes around the globe in trying to protest political censorship. Some claim it's entirely different, but it's not. Both involve a government entity deciding that websites cannot be reached without a trial. This makes the US look ridiculous in the eyes of the world, but I guess as long as it makes sure that Universal and Warner Bros. can prop up their profits for a few more years... it's all good.